5. Tamar Lewinsky, Sandrine Mayoraz - East European Jews in Switzerland (New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History)[Retail].pdf

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East European Jews in Switzerland
New Perspectives on
Modern Jewish History
Edited by Cornelia Wilhelm
Volume 5
East European Jews in
Switzerland
Edited by
Tamar Lewinsky and Sandrine Mayoraz
Publication of this book is made possible in part by support from the Stiftung Dialogik, the
Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft, and the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities.
ISBN 978-3-11-030069-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-030071-0
ISSN 2192-9645
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the
Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin
Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
♾ Printed on acid free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
East European Jewish Immigrants
Between Two Worlds. A Preface
*
Joseph Roth turns time and again in his work to the subject of East European Jewish
identity. “Eastern Jews have no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in
every cemetery,” he writes in connection with the emigration of Jews from Eastern
Europe.1 The first emigrations from the East European settlements began with the
massacres of Jews during the Cossack and peasant uprising in Ukraine in 1648. They
intensified after a number of famines and epidemics in the Russian Empire towards
the end of the 1860s, reaching their peak in the “great migration” following anti-Jew-
ish riots in the 1870s and after the mass pogroms that followed the assassination of
Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The reinstatement of discriminatory legislation destroyed
any hope of equality before the law in the foreseeable future, and the increasing
impoverishment of ever larger sections of the Jewish population throughout Eastern
Europe led to despair. Millions of Jews moved west, mostly to the USA.
A small number of them also came to Switzerland. Most were just “passing
through” (Passanten) – transit travelers who sometimes, however, stayed longer, and
occasionally even settled permanently. Yet in addition to these, there were Jews who
were living in Switzerland only temporarily, with no intention of immigrating on a
permanent basis. Jewish students chose to study in Switzerland because conditions
were better here than in their home countries. From the second half of the nineteenth
century until the 1917 Russian Revolution there were also a number of Jewish politi-
cians in Switzerland; these were generally members of revolutionary socialist orga-
nizations and parties that were forbidden in the countries of Eastern Europe. They
hoped that neutral Switzerland would provide an environment in which they could
consolidate their ranks and use their networks to influence events in Eastern Europe.
It was a similar situation with writers and artists, who moved to Switzerland to escape
censorship and a lack of job opportunities. Many of these people planned to return to
their respective countries as soon as circumstances allowed. They had no intention of
abandoning their homes in Eastern Europe; on the contrary, they wanted to help to
improve conditions there. In particular, the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania,
Poland and Russia, or the Bund for short, whose activities in Switzerland were very
important, espoused the concept of
doikayt
– the right to belong to a community in
the territory where the Jews had been born and raised.
* Translated
by Joy Titheridge
1 Roth,
Joseph.
The Wandering Jews,
trans. Michael Hofmann. New York: W. W. Norton & Com-
pany, 2001, 11.

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